A.M. van den Beucken

Dr. Twan van den Beucken studied technical microbiology at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Venlo, were he graduated cum laude in 1998. In the period of 1998 to 2001 he was trained in antibody engineering using phage display technology under supervision of Prof. Hoogenboom at the start-up biotech company Target Quest. From 2001 to 2003 Dr. van den Beucken worked as a senior associate scientist at the biotech company Dyax S.A. in Liege, Belgium. Where he developed a new technology for rapid affinity maturation of human Fab antibody fragments using flow cytometric cell sorting of yeast display libraries. In 2003 he started his PhD at the department of Radiation Oncology (Maastro) within the University of Maastricht, where he studied the effects of tumor hypoxia on translational control, gene expression and cell survival.  From 2008 to 2010 Dr. van den Beucken trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ontario Cancer Institute at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. During this period he and his colleagues discovered that hypoxic tumor cells acquire a metastatic phenotype by down-regulating overall microRNA processing through repression of the ribo-endonuclease DICER. In the same period he also started to perform genome-wide functional drop-out screens using pooled lentiviral shRNA libraries to identify novel therapeutic targets for cancer therapy. Dr. van den Beucken continued these research projects when he returned at the department of radiation oncology (Maastro) during 2011 to 2014. In February 2014 Dr. van den Beucken started as an assistant professor at the department of Toxicogenomics at the University of Maastricht.